I’m sure you saw the pictures of the INDECLINE installation in Bryan Park yesterday. If not, Ned Oliver took a couple of photos. The two best things I’ve read (so far) about this are from Free Egunfemi at Untold RVA and Michael Paul Williams at the RTD. The former said, “Once again, presumptuous, patriarchal self-motivated white folks comprehending the least are doing the most.” The latter said, “There’s nothing funny about a lynching.”

Tom Perriello has a column in the RTD about where do we go from here? His suggestion is a statewide Truth and Reconcilliation Commission to figure out “systematic, nonpartisan public processes for establishing a common understanding of our history, evaluating how we publicly memorialize that history and tackling policy reforms that address the painful legacies of our past.” This would be like the Monument Avenue Commission, but with a much, much larger scope and authority. I’m into it!

Amazon has put out an RFP for their second headquarters (PDF). I’d like you to notice that one of their core site requirements is access to mass transit. Also note that they’ve paid $43 million into Seattle’s transit system, which is just about an entire year of GRTC’s operating budget. As you can imagine, the opportunity to snag up to 50,000 jobs has mayors across the nation (including our own) signing up for what feels a lot like Mayoral Hunger Games. May the odds be ever in your favor, mayors!

Sports!

Kickers knocked off Orlando, 0-2,

Spiders take on #25 Colgate at 1:00 PM on Saturday.

#18 Hokies host Delaware at 3:30 PM.

Wahoos welcome Indiana to Charlottesville, also at 3:30 PM.

Nats beat the Phils, 4-3, and look to do it again tonight at 7:05 PM.

This morning's patron longread!

From Patron Phil comes this longread by Ta-nehisi Coates in the Atlantic. It’s long, sad, hard to read, and filled with things to think about.

To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.

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This morning's longread

I love concepting big, underused streets because it gives folks the chance to see how much better our cities could be without spending a ton of money pouring concrete. Someone should do this to a bunch of spots in Richmond.

How can strips of asphalt become something transformative? Earlier this year, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) released the Global Street Design Guide, a compendium of innovative case studies from more than 70 countries across the globe, addressing everything from bus-rapid transit to bike lanes, parklets to pedestrian plazas. Curbed applied these ideas to five different U.S. cities, using some of the concepts sketched out in the book as starting points to reimagine each intersection or street. Not every before-and-after scenario may be completely feasible, but each offers a vision of how designers can reclaim and repurpose our ever-present roadways.